BENJAMIN DENISTON: Good evening; it’s March 3, 2017, and you’re joining us for our Friday evening webcast at larouchepac.com. I’m joined in the studio tonight by Paul Gallagher, Economics Editor of Executive Intelligence Review; and via video, I’m joined by Bill Roberts, a member of the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee.

Today, we will be announcing the launching of some new initiatives coming directly off the highly successful petitioning campaign we mobilized in January and February on Glass-Steagall. Over 3000 signatures, including both online petitions and written signers, were delivered to President Trump, as well as numerous members of Congress. There were other organizations supporting a similar initiative that also gathered thousands of signatures. Maybe the signatures number might not sound that big compared to other petitions, but this reflected a very effective and important campaign. There have been 14 state legislatures just this year that have introduced resolutions either calling on the Congress to support Glass-Steagall along, or Glass-Steagall and some variation of Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws program. We saw Glass-Steagall come up front and center in the Senate hearing in the confirmation process for the person who became Treasury Secretary, Mnuchin; where he was put directly on the spot on the issue of Glass-Steagall. We’ve seen an array of media coverage that has indicated that Wall Street has been holding its breath to see whether or not this is going to become the issue or not. So, anybody who has any sense, recognizes that this has become a central fight. Wall Street is terrified of this issue; they know there is still serious support for this issue. While Trump didn’t endorse this in his State of the Union, this is not a time to either pat ourselves on the back for the effect we’ve had, or to sit back and give up; this is a time to escalate.

This is an active, ongoing fight; and after a series of discussions with Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche over the last couple of days, we are re-escalating and re-emphasizing a new campaign on this initiative. This will feature a new petition; the last one focused on this address to Congress. This new petition is a little bit more open-ended and is going to be a new rallying point for a national and international campaign to get the United States on board with this program. So, I just want to read this petition. It’s going to be released very shortly on the website; and anyone who is a signer on the current petition will get this immediately. So, if you haven’t signed the petition yet, make sure you sign yourself. You will be part of our campaign, and you’ll receive real-time updates — daily, weekly, anytime there are breaking developments on this issue, you will be updated. You will know what’s going on, and you will be part of our action orientation.

We’re not asking people just to leave a name and number and that’s it; we’re asking people to join the fight. So, as you can see on the screen here, you can sign up; you can get the information via text message on your phone, simply by texting the letters “GSACT” to the number 52886. Simply that action along will begin the process of you being able to read and sign the petition and join the campaign. If you signed up, you will immediately receive the release of our new petition; which I’m going to read a copy of here, and this will be out very shortly. The new draft reads:

“President Trump and the 115th Congress: The US needs win-win development; implement LaRouche’s Four Laws and join China’s New Silk Road.

“We, the undersigned, recognize that the trans-Atlantic financial system is on the verge of a new blow-out worse than that of 2007-8. The conditions of life for the vast majority of Americans have been steadily collapsing over the past two decades. US economic policy has been focussed on protecting Wall Street’s speculative bubble, instead of protecting the General Welfare and future prosperity of the American people. We recognize that emergency action is now needed to preempt a new financial crisis and to put Americans back to work rebuilding our nation and our future.

“To accomplish this, we ask President Donald Trump and the 115th Congress to pass and implement LaRouche’s Four Laws Program for Economic Recovery on an emergency basis; and to join China’s New Silk Road program for global cooperation and large-scale infrastructure projects and economic development.

“The Four Laws define a coherent economic recovery program rooted in the American System of economics:

“3. Direct Federal credit to projects and initiatives which create rising levels of productivity and incomes.

“4. Launch a crash program for the development of fusion power and the rapid expansion of our space program.

“The American recovery will be greatly accelerated if the United States joins the global infrastructure development and economic renaissance flowing from China’s New Silk Road program.”

So again, this will be released very shortly; this will be the new rallying point for a petition, but really a national campaign mobilization for this issue. We’ll get into some of this in a little more detail, but I’ll also pre-announce that we are in the process of updating the LaRouche PAC pamphlet/report on this very subject — the LaRouche Four Laws program and the United States joining the New Silk Road. So over the coming days, look forward to the release of that new report; it really is supplemental and back-up to the content of this petition here. And again, if you are signed up as part of our petition campaign, you will also receive an announcement as soon as this is ready.

So, we’ll discuss a little bit more the new content in this report; but before we get into that, I think the issue that needs to be discussed is the kickback and the fight against this policy going through. And as was mentioned in some of the coverage of the Glass-Steagall fight over the last couple of months, Wall Street, London, the international financial apparatus that’s really been running the United States and the Obama administration, does recognize that Trump is prone to go in this direction; and they are terrified that the United States is going to throw over the chessboard of the past 16 years of policy and actually work with Russia, China, and other nations on the basis of mutual development and collaboration. This would mean the end of the British Empire; something we’re all looking forward to celebrating. But they’re not giving up; there is a massive operation being run against the US Presidency, against the administration of Donald Trump; and this has to be a subject that we have to kick back against if we’re going to get any of this through.

PAUL GALLAGHER: Well, we’re right now in the middle of a fight in which it’s become very well exposed that the past President of the United States, Barack Obama, is trying to overthrow the President who has just gotten elected. This is the situation. He is not alone in this, quite obviously. We’ve put out a dossier recently on the collaboration between George Soros, his money, his foundations, his forces around Europe in particular, and the Ukraine revolution — which they pulled off — and the attempt to do the same thing to Trump here in the United States. This is now becoming more exposed. On the one hand, the New York Times has just run an article today making clear that the Obama administration took extraordinary actions in its last days in order to disseminate what had been classified information and make sure that it was widely spread throughout the government; that its classification was lowered, and that the National Security Agency’s limitations on distributing its intercepts against communications of all kinds, that the barriers against its distributing this throughout other parts of the government, other parts of the intelligence community were pulled down so that — as some people called it — the “breadcrumbs” which supposed represented Trump campaign team collaboration with Russia would be everywhere.

The Daily Mail in London today runs a story with an unnamed source who they say is an Obama family friend, which says that they have been told that Obama personally intends to lead the drive until it’s successful to get Trump removed from office, either by impeachment or by resignation. And that this is something to which he was persuaded by a number of people, including Valerie Jarrett; who stayed in Washington and set up with Obama in that Kalorama mansion in Washington DC for that purpose. Obviously, the one other country in the United States and Europe where this kind of furor to attempt to undo the election has been in Britain; a furor both to try and undo the Brexit vote and to try to undo the Trump election, although in the rest of Europe as well, a lot of the elites are hysterical against the Trump Presidency and are even calling for his assassination. This has gone even to the chief editor of Die Zeit, one of the leading “liberal” newspapers in Europe, who — on national television in Germany — suggested that Trump might be assassinated. What he said has been quite typical of exactly that liberal elite.

Now, what we’re dealing with here is that voters around the world, the public in nations around Europe, including Eastern Europe and the United States, to a certain extent in southern Asia, have been voting to reject the entire era of globalization and deindustrialization of the last 30 years. They’ve been doing that for good reason, because it has lowered their living standards, lowered their productivity, and has emasculated government which otherwise would have been investing in their manufacturing sectors and investing in their infrastructure; it’s prevented them from doing that. It’s produced a truly dismal era of economy in which there was a crash unlike any since 1929-1931. Why? Because this era of industrialization produced tremendous levels of debt, tremendous build-ups of debt relative to economic product; and the securitization of that debt in order to try to wave hands and say that that total debt build-up was not a problem, securitizing it all. When it reached the point of securitizing unpayable debt in the US real estate household mortgage sector, it blew up the entire global banking system as I said, in a way not seen since 1929-31.

DENISTON: It’s something we’ve never actually recovered from.

GALLAGHER: Since that time, we have not recovered; we have been characterized by rates of economic growth to 1% to 1.5% throughout the Obama administration in the United States; 0% to 0.5% and in some cases negative growth for the entire period throughout Europe. The only way in which this globalization elite in the United States, Britain, and Europe has kept itself together, has been by trying to assert military dominance and the right to overthrow governments anywhere in the world, and by declaring virtual war against Russia in order to maintain a situation of extreme hostility both to Russia and to China. Why? Because in China, in Asia more generally but in China in particular, the alternative to this terrible stagnation which voters have been rejecting in all these countries; that alternative has been clearly emerging in the rates of investment, overcoming of poverty, real progress, technological and scientific leadership coming from China, and other Asian nations to a significant extent as well. So that if we see now, all of a sudden, the Democratic Party in the United States has become, apparently, a McCarthyite policy, where…

DENISTON: The Red Scare’s back.

GALLAGHER: … Yeah, where Schumer sits up there and says, “Let me ask you, sir, have you ever, in any time in your past life, known a Russian? Have you ever been in a room where a Russian was present?” Where the Minority Leader of the Senate and Leader of the Democrats in the Congress has turned into Joe McCarthy, this is the reason. It’s not his background as a McCarthyite. It’s this absolute refusal to accept the rejection of this 30-year period of globalization, de-industrialization, impoverishment of populations in the United States and Europe, and throughout Eastern Europe.

Just so that people understand what’s going on here. In every Eastern European government which has recently rejected, or, the voters have elected it, to reject the bankers’ socialism of the European Union — in every one of those countries, the same kinds of efforts with demonstrations, protests, funded by George Soros, the same kind of effort to overthrow those governments which have just been elected, is going on in Macedonia, in Romania. Obviously it happened in Ukraine. In Bulgaria, in all of these countries. In the attempts to fix the French election, to knock out anybody in the French election who isn’t in this bankers’ socialism league, by prosecuting them in the middle of the election campaign — everywhere this is happening at the same time.

That’s what we’re seeing in the United States, but I think, as the President said in the tweet, which I don’t remember if you mentioned at the outset, but what he said today about this latest crazy Sessions business. Sessions, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, talked to the Russian Ambassador. That’s his job! And that’s the Russian Ambassador’s job, is to go talk to him! And it was his job, as senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to talk to him! These are absurdities, and, as President Trump said in responding to this today, “The Democrats are overplaying their hand.” They are so desperate to find a way to reverse this entire movement throughout the United States and Europe and Eastern Europe and places like the Philippines; and, again, put Russia under the pressure of confrontation again, develop a complete hostility and encirclement of China. They’re so desperate to get this back that they’ve now, as he said, overplayed their hand, descended into absurdity.

What clearly was represented in the most recent speech that he made, is that, as you said, he is open to this kind of thing. It’s ironic: the President, Trump, even before he was even inaugurated, met with the Prime Minister of Japan. This is not exactly an unusual thing — that an incoming President’s team would be meeting with foreign leaders. He met in New York with the President of Japan in early January for the first time.

In these countries, there is the obvious offer of what you pointed to, there, that the United States can join a New Silk Road which for three years has been the announced foreign policy of China — the “win-win” policy of China. This economic belt across Eurasia with rail lines of all kinds being built; and the maritime belt going through the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal, up from Southern Europe into Central Europe, again, with ports, with railroads, with power development. This all is effectively an offer to the United States and it’s an offer in the area where President Trump and his team are clearly weakest. That is, how to do what they’re aiming for, which is to really get economic growth and progress going in the United States for the first time in decades. They are very weak on how to do that. This New Silk Road policy, coming from Asia, in particular from the powers of Asia, offers them a simple way to break through and do that. And that’s why we’re seeing this hysterical apparent McCarthyism on the part of the Democrats who made themselves into effectively a party of war with Russia, and containment and potential war with China. Not exactly what their voters wanted them to be at this point either.

I think we’re in a situation now where it’s become against their wishes. It’s become an extremely open political situation for us to move with this idea of the United States joining the New Silk Road, and using the actions that we call the Four Laws of LaRouche, using those actions in order to do it.

DENISTON: Bill might have more on this, but I think this discussion is critical, because part of this whole “color revolution” process in the U.S. is just this insane party-line bickering. It really is surface level. If you’re out there talking to the American people, and you’re out there talking to people that voted for Trump or voted for Sanders or didn’t vote at all, there’s a clearcommonality in line for this program, that permeates America as a whole.

The idea of trying to get people caught up in this red vs. blue, party-line debate on these issues, is really paper-thin on the surface when you get to the actual substance. I know Bill’s been doing some work in the Midwest, the area where he’s centered, where you see a lot of this patriotic American tradition coming back to ferment, in line for this kind of program. Part of what we really have in this report that’s going to be coming out, is a further elaboration of what the United States can do in this program. We can have all the kind of high speed rail we need, we can have the water we need, we can the power we need, we can have quality jobs for the American people. Anybody who wants a quality job can get it. We have the program, and it really is critical to organize on this level to get support for this, to get this thing through.

So, Bill, I don’t know if you want to comment on the content of the report, or some of the work you have been doing out there.

ROBERTS: I would tend to agree with Trump that the Democrats are really overplaying their hand on this question of demonizing Russia, because the Democratic Party, a lot of Democrats don’t really like this idea that we’re going to revive the Cold War right now. I think this demonization of Trump on this Russia question has tended to create, in Republican’s minds, much more of an openness to collaboration with Russia. Some of the Republicans — they would tend to be the Heritage Foundation types, the Wall Street Journal reading types — are probably tending much and much more so to see that this is just a crazy McCarthyite revival going on right now.

A lot of Americans are simply going to reject everything. This is what we saw in the election. People are going to tend to reject everything that’s been associated with the last 16 years of the Obama and Bush administrations. We’re seeing this develop more clearly in terms of what Trump talked about in his address to Congress. It was a very clear repudiation of this post-9/11 Bush “clash of civilizations” policy; that we don’t represent the world. We’re not going to go abroad “searching for monsters to destroy.”

I would say, one of the more interesting aspects of Trump’s address to the Congress, was this reference to Lincoln; not just the reference to the protectionist policy — which, in its own way, is part of the Hamilton credit system — but actually the reference to the 1876 Centennial Celebration. He said we have the 250-Year Anniversary of the country coming up, and as they did when the 100-Year Anniversary of the United States was being planned, we should be thinking about the future; we should be thinking about what kind of breakthroughs that we can create that will represent real accomplishments, and work to get above party divisions on small things. In this sense, he very much set a kind of Lincolnesque and FDR tone in this discussion.

But it’s interesting that he referred to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, because this was a real inflection point of the spread of the American System to countries that the British Empire had to later work very hard to turn against one another. Japan, Germany, Russia — under the influence of Henry Carey. China. The first half of the 20th Century was typified by wars that the British, in manipulating these great nations that had been influenced by the policies of the Lincoln American System. And then, of course, in the second half of the 20th Century, you had the Cold War. You had the British moving in after the death of Roosevelt, to divide the war on the basis of East vs. West.

I think this reference to going beyond parties, looking at the principle of this country, identifying a certain kind of Promethean quality, is good; and you’re going to have Americans tend to become optimistic about returning to a space program. You’re going to have Americans obviously agree with the necessity of building infrastructure; Glass-Steagall.

But, there’s definitely a limit there at the same time. These potentials are obviously frightening to the Establishment and represent something that they are clearly in a last-ditch effort to try to destroy through this Obama/Soros/McCarthyist revival. However, in terms of how you actually unleash a Promethean economic environment, both culturally and in terms of real increases of productivity, that is the principle that ties Glass-Steagall to the issuance of credit and the way in which the breakthroughs, the products of the human mind as a result of those policies, bring about the upward transformations in productivity. That’s really uniquely something that no one besides the LaRouche movement has worked through and developed a very clear policy program for.

I would just say that there are a number of rallies coming up this weekend — pro-Trump rallies across the country. Keep an eye out for notifications that we will be getting out to people who have signed the Glass-Steagall petition. We will be organizing a whole series of activities across the country in support of activities to bring the Four Laws to this American constituency, to this highly-energized American constituency that is looking for solutions. I would urge people to find these rallies and get on the megaphone, get on the microphone at these events. Call up your city council, call up your state representatives. This is a sort of unique situation in which there is a kind of proper repudiation of the failed policies of Obama and Bush — the geopolitics and so forth — but without a real conception of how to replace a monetarist thinking in economics with the kind of Promethean concept which Mr. LaRouche has spent his life developing, this will certainly not come into fruition. You will not see, it will not be possible for the United States to find its place in terms of the unique role that we have to play now in joining the New Silk Road in the future of mankind. So, I would just urge people to be extremely active in the next couple of days in finding ways to inject this unique conception of LaRouche’s Four Laws into the discussion process; and I guarantee people will be in the state of mind of wanting to work through and master these ideas, because it’s really a life-and-death question.

GALLAGHER: Bill, I know that you did some organizing directly with meetings that were taking place in the course of this contest for who would be the new chairman of the Democratic Party. Some of them took place out there in your area. That’s another matter in which it has become exposed just in recent days that the person who initially seemed to be supported by most of the party — Rep. Ellison of Minnesota — had put up against him by the direct solicitation of Obama and Biden, Obama’s former labor secretary; and Obama, Biden, and others then did a lot of telephone calling in order to make sure that this former labor secretary, Perez, would beat Ellison and take over the chair of the Democratic National Committee. This was another instance of what’s been going on. But I know that you saw that this was something which was definitely non-partisan and definitely wide open when petitioning at those meetings to decide the leadership of the Democratic Party. We found at the same time that at all sorts of meetings, from the collaboration we had with people who had supported Bernie Sanders in Ohio, all the way to the CPAC convention — the conservative side of the Republican Party — that people were signing these petitions specifically to get the Glass-Steagall introduced again. I think the total that we had gathered, together with that parallel effort by people in Ohio, it was certainly in the range of no more than 6-7000 signatures overall; and yet, they were used by the key Congressmen and -women who introduced Glass-Steagall back on February 1st, just about a month ago. Marcy Kaptur, Tim Ryan, Tulsi Gabbard, and Walter Jones; they had those petitions when they had their press conference introducing HR709, which is the current House Glass-Steagall bill. It has now gotten 30-some co-sponsors.

Also, while that petition campaign was going on — again it may seem modest — but while it was going on, we were also contacting state legislators and state senators, particularly in the so-called Rust Belt, the formerly industrial part of the country. The result of that, just in the month of January, is that I think Ben, it’s actually 15 if you count states in which both houses introduced this; that resolutions in support of what we’re calling an American Recovery Program, which was essentially the outline of the Four Laws. Glass-Steagall; Hamiltonian national bank; credit for high-technology infrastructure; and space and fusion development. Those resolutions went into nine states — and I’ll just mention, in three states, they went into both houses during January; that was Rhode Island, Minnesota, and Washington state. In six other states, they went into either the House or the Senate. I’m sorry, Illinois is the fourth state in which they were in both houses; it has already been passed in the Illinois House, and introduced into the Illinois Senate. Then there were other states in which it went into just one house: the Alabama House, the Iowa Senate, the South Carolina House, the Mississippi House, the New Mexico Senate. In addition to that, there were three other states where resolutions simply naming Glass-Steagall and calling on Congress to pass the Glass-Steagall Act were introduced: Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland — where there was a hearing this afternoon actually for which I prepared testimony on that resolution, HJ4 in Maryland, calling on its Congressional delegation to pass Glass-Steagall.

So, this development which has occurred during January and February while we’ve been on this petition and organizing drive on a bipartisan basis, is also wide open or open-ended; because anyone who has been a part of that, even just to sign the petition, even online, anyone who has been a part of that from any of those states or any other states which have come close — particularly Ohio, New York state — these states are still in session. Anyone can make it their project with their state legislator, to make sure that he or she co-sponsors this resolution and contacts whatever Congressmen he usually deals with. And these state legislators do, so that we can really make these legislatures in these Rust Belt states in particular, make them boil with this campaign for the Four Laws, for the actions that have to taken to be able to join the New Silk Road development. If we’re doing that at that level, at the same time, it’s going to have a big impact on the Congress. So, I just wanted to point that out.

DENISTON: I think that’s exactly the kind of initiative that’s going to continue and grow with this new petition, this new campaign escalation. And I think people should have no other priorities at this point; we have this issue which is the economic life or death of the United States, and we have — as Paul, you mentioned — more material coming out on this whole colored revolution policy. I was glad you went through some of the details; this is, I think, at least for generations, an unprecedented level of attack on a US Presidential administration from within. It reminded me of some of the treasonous actions that were done right before Lincoln came in, to try and set up the South and their split for the Civil War before he came in as President; just this outright treasonous sabotage of an incoming administration; but the way we’re going to cut through it is this kind of mobilization. Again, I would point people to also the upcoming release of our new report, which will have a more in-depth presentation of the principle of this recovery program. And going also back to what Bill was saying, this is really the way we’re going to capture the spirit, the soul of the American people again, by this returned commitment to the future development, the future growth of our nation. And getting people rallied around the fact and out of this pessimism and cynicism that just settled in over so long with Bush and Obama emphatically; but going back even further, we’ve had this terrible zero-growth economic policy that’s affected people much more deeply than they realized. So getting a real, true realization that we can again return to this level of growth; just the basic idea that every generation is going to be a revolutionary advance in the living standards, in the opportunities, in the growth of the science, the capabilities of mankind. If people really get a sense that that’s possible, that that’s what’s represented by China’s leadership in this New Silk Road program, this returned orientation to space; I think that will give people the level of fight they need to get this thing through. The kind of things Paul was just presenting in terms of the top-down, Federal level, local level, also municipalities, labor organizations; all of these groups should be organized and we should just throw this party crap out the window. It’s an issue of what is your commitment to the principles and the policies the nation needs at this point. If we can continue to rally people around that, then we’ll have a basis to actually get this thing through and give Trump the support he needs to go with these initiatives that he’s talked about.

So Bill, I don’t know if you have anything you want to add from some of your work there.

ROBERTS: I would just point out that state representatives and these local and state elected officials, these are the people that the Congress goes to. Because the Congress is inside the Beltway; they’re the most affected by the insanity of these last two Presidents. But the local elected officials, the state representatives, these are the guys living through the drug epidemic, the violence, the mass unemployment, the 94 million Americans who are outside the workforce that Trump referred to in his speech this past week. Those are the constituents; those are the people that these local representatives live with. So, I think these are the types of people to get to. Radio stations; this is the way we can effectively now very quickly make LaRouche’s Four Laws as much of a household word as Glass-Steagall is.

GALLAGHER: Well, we also have other fronts that are going to be dealt with specifically in the pamphlet. One is the issue of — which again, Trump brought up in the address to Congress — of large-scale infrastructure development. If you look at the ground level of it, it appears that there’s no direction there; there was a meeting of the various members of the Cabinet yesterday — and other staff. But it was run by a Goldman-Sachs guy, Gary Cohen. But there was effectively an administration meeting on infrastructure legislation; starting to move to introduce legislation for this idea of a trillion-dollar infrastructure bank. At the same time, you have on the Democratic side, already legislation which has been submitted. But there is a complete barricade there in terms of knowing how to finance it, knowing what the really transformative infrastructure developments like a national — not East and West Coast — but a national, 25-30,000-mile network of high-speed rail and maglev rail. This is nothing futuristic; this is simply China. This is exactly what they’re building. They’re building local subway lines now, local metro lines with maglev technology in China, and putting them into operation. So, if you’re going from the Bronx to lower Manhattan, on your 25 or 30 stops, you’d be going in between those stops in a completely smooth and frictionless drive at up to 60mph in between each stop. Having already done this on the level of intercity, and having already gone far to linking every city in the country — and China has a very large number of significant cities — linking every single one of them with true high-speed rail; now they’re down to the level of the subways and maglev metro systems. But this is the kind of thing that produces tremendous increases not only in productive employment, but productivity.

This idea has to be put into the discussions of infrastructure in the United States, and so do Japanese and Chinese methods and investments have to be put into this idea of rebuilding the infrastructure of the United States. They don’t have that idea now. What’s getting underway seems hopelessly limited by the lack of any real idea of how to do it. On the other hand, you have the President talking about the 2026 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence as a horizon point to which people should look; and think about how the economy, the infrastructure, as he said, are “footsteps on distant worlds is not too much to hope” in that 9-year period of time. Giving people a horizon to look at what actually could be transformed during the period of the next decade. That’s the kind of thing that puts Americans into the right state of mind in thinking about being more open politically, being more open in terms of what they think is possible. In that sense, he definitely did contribute to defining the right solutions which he and his team clearly don’t have at this point, in order to make this kind of trillion or multi-trillion dollar infrastructure bank investment work. The same is true with space; where there is clearly discussion in the administration — and in NASA as a result — of trying more quickly to put astronauts in orbit around the Moon, preparatory to beginning the re-colonization and industrialization and development of the Moon. Something which had been completely wiped aside during the Obama administration, which clearly wrote this off and said, we don’t need this. We don’t need fancy energy sources like fusion energy, he said to one backyard group of Democrats in Virginia.

So, this is a different view, but one in which we have to drive to a certain extent from the bottom up, as we’ve been doing; as well as discussions with people in Congress and in the administration in order to crystallize the right idea. Also, so that they see that Glass-Steagall, if it isn’t passed now, the next major bank failure — and there are plenty of them waiting to happen in Europe in particular at any moment — the next major bank failure is going to take the system down again like Lehman did and AIG did, ten years ago. If it isn’t implemented right now, the banks are going to continue not to lend to small- and medium-sized enterprises which tend to have the new technologies coming on line; and only to lend to the big bond issuers and the largest corporations.

One thing that I pointed out in the testimony today in Maryland, is that JP Morgan/Chase and Citigroup each only lends out loans and leases equal to about 65% to 66% of their deposits. Whereas in the banking system as a whole, it’s 80%. That means that if you take all the community banks and regional banks around the country — 6000 of them — their lending is equivalent to 90-plus% of their deposits. And yet, this little group of six or ten banks who control two-thirds of all the deposits, their lending is very low; and that’s going to continue to be the case. If a real infrastructure development bank gets going, then this lack of lending to the contractors for all those projects by the private banks is going to be a real problem. So, you’re going to have that problem if you don’t implement Glass-Steagall now, and separate out the commercial banks. And in addition, of course, we’ve had now these big banks have — according a report a couple of days ago — now accrued $321 billion worth of fines since the crash, for illegal, immoral, and otherwise non-banking despicable activity; which is the way they’ve used these deposits.

DENISTON: And that’s without an actual Pecora Commission or any serious investigation.

GALLAGHER: Without ever a prosecution of a senior banker; $321 billion worth of fines for violating banking practice and violating the law.

DENISTON: They give them the fines, but they let them keep doing it; so it makes you wonder if it’s a fine or just a cut the government’s taking on the scam or something. That’s good; I think that really ties to the necessity of the Four Laws as a whole. To have a functioning banking system doesn’t mean anything without what you were raising about the issue of productivity and investment. It really is a question of what are you doing to facilitate the investment of creating a higher level of net productivity for the economy as a whole? A higher level of scientific, technological state for mankind as a whole? Which is something that mankind can uniquely do; that’s our character, to create those kinds of revolutionary advances. That’s the secret of economics, as Mr. LaRouche has kind of uniquely developed and discovered in a higher way than I think anyone before him.

Anyway, just take that as another teaser for the content of this upcoming report; because that will be material presented in there.

Just to conclude, I would just re-emphasize that anybody who has not signed on to the petition yet — even the old petition — please do so; because you’ll then be ready to be updated as soon as the new petition is released, as soon as this report is released, and any other relevant breaking developments on our campaign which I think we’ve discussed rather thoroughly as a good launch point. We are in the footing for a rapid escalation; and that’s what’s needed right now. So, I think this served as a good launch point for some more material we’ll have in the coming days and weeks.

We thank you for joining us today, and we’ll be back on larouchepac.com with more.

GALLAGHER: Can I just remind people, before you sign off, everybody watching this, that this online petition is still to be signed. What we’re going to do, we will try then to involve everybody who’s signing it, in what we’re going to do immediately in the next week to ten days. There are going to be — as Bill mentioned — pro-Trump rallies tomorrow in quite a number of places; we’re going to be at all the ones we can reach. In fact, we’re speaking at one of them up in the New York City area. Then our own rallies and lobbying both in Washington and in New York on Thursday, and in other parts of the country next Thursday. We’re going to have rallies before that in New York, and what we call a Day of Action, when we’ll be going after all kinds of elected officials at the local, state, and national levels next Thursday. Everybody who’s been involved in this petition campaign up to now — even if it’s only been just to sign — the targets are there; that’s what we indicated. We can move, and must move, elected officials up to and including those in the Trump administration in order to break this logjam. I just wanted to throw that in.

DENISTON: Thank you. We have a clear path of action ahead of us. I encourage everyone to get directly on board with that. If you want to take more action, email us on the website, get directly in contact and volunteer yourself for further action. We have an action center on the LaRouche PAC website. If you go to the front page, you’ll see it at the very top there on the top menu banner. So get active; get in contact with us there and let’s make this happen. Let’s not sit on our laurels and wait here.

Thank you for joining us here today. Stay tuned for more from larouchepac.com.

SUPPORTING MATERIAL

China appears to be concerned that a new Greek Debt crisis could lead to a new global financial crisis and even collapse the Eurozone which would have a huge impact on China. These concerns are expressed in a commentary entitled “A Greek Crisis Could Impact China’s Market” published in Global Times on Feb. 22, by Prof. Liang Haiming, chief economist of China Silk Road Valley Research Institute, a Guangzhou-based think tank. While his analysis might be flawed, he expresses real concern for the possibility of a major crisis, if not the collapse of the Eurozone, if the Europeans don’t change their policies.

Liang writes that while everyone is preoccupied by President Donald Trump’s Tweets, there are “hidden dangers from Europe, especially regarding the Greek debt problem or even a fresh outbreak of Greece debt crisis, which could impact countries across the globe, including China.”

After reviewing the unsustainability of the Greek debt which could reach 200% of GDP with zero chance of the collapsing Greek economy “growing” out of the crisis as Greece’s creditors assert, he writes, “Greece’s debt issue has become a major hazard for this year’s global financial markets.” Furthermore if countries decide to leave the Eurozone it “would push the euro to the verge of collapse. Letting the euro fall to pieces would further hit international financial markets, including China.”

Liang fears the Europeans would deal with the crisis by “introducing negative interest rates and quantitative easing, leaving the unresolved problems for Europe’s next generation.” Given the fact that QE has failed both in the U.S. and Japan, “the money-printing method in the EU would put the euro in a perilous state.”

He also warned that if the Eurozone splits between Germany and the other northern countries and the south, or the countries in the south are forced to adopt their own currencies, it could also induce unforeseen “financial shocks into the global markets” which will affect China, as well as other nations.